baehr_p_richter_m_dictatorship_in_history_and_theory_bonapar

Second Empire’s proposals for greater local liberty were not merely theoretical. The Empire’s record on decentralization can also be judged on the basis of the evolution of the regime’s local political and administrative practices. In this respect, the picture in 1870 differed considerably from the early days of the Empire. This was notably the case at the departmental level, where the July 1866 law widened the budgetary attributions of the General Councils, and reduced the role of the prefects to one of a posteriori control in a large number of areas concerned with departmental matters (such as road construction and maintenance). The cause of economic decentralization was thus substantively advanced during the 1860s, and this as a direct result of the Empire’s legislation.75

More fundamentally, the political and administrative relationship between Paris and its provinces became progressively less centralist during the two decades of imperial government. The centralized control of the prefects over local political and administrative life, which had been intended by the regime in the early days of the Empire, was effectively replaced by a much more fluid and complex set of interactions between center and periphery (as well as within the periphery itself ). The prefects’ powers were progressively challenged by three (sometimes rival, often collusive) sets of local actors: the mayors, General Councillors, and the elected representatives in the Corps Legislatif´ . Mayors of large towns or cities and leading members of the General Council were almost invariably figures with strong local prestige, many of whom also enjoyed powerful positions in Paris. As one wag noted in 1869, “The race of multiple office-holders has always existed, but it has never been as flourishing as today.”76

Indeed, throughout the duration of the Empire, it has been estimated that two-thirds of all ministers, three-fifths of the Council of State, and more than four-fifths of all members of the Corps legislatif´ also served on the General Council.77 The presidency of the latter body was often held by a highly influential figure in the Parisian hierarchy of Bonapartism. These individuals could sidestep the machinations of the local administration with relative ease, and indeed it was often they who set the standards and norms the prefects had to follow. In departments where the presidency of the departmental assembly was held by the likes of Persigny, Morny, Rouher, Baroche, Billault, and Fould, it was clearly these elected notables who held sway over local affairs, not the representatives of the state. The same was

75 Pierre Bodineau and Michel Verpeaux, Histoire de la decentralisation´ (Paris, 1993), 53. 76 Aurelien´ Scholl, in Le Lorgnon, December 11, 1869.

77 Bernard le Clere` and Vincent Wright, Les pref´ ets´ du Second Empire, 136.

true of a large number of powerful members of the Corps Legislatif,´ whose networks allowed them to circumvent and often subvert the position of the administration in their department.

Already in 1866, Persigny had deplored the political consequences of the drift toward parliamentary government: “the deputy is tending to become a figure of disproportionate importance in his locality, for he is the source of all favours and disposes of the patronage of the State over the whole administration. Moral influence is thus slipping away from the administration into his hands.”78 At a lower level of the administrative hierarchy, Bonapartist bureaucrats watched helplessly as power seeped away from administrative to elective bodies. The sub-prefect of Tournon noted rather plaintively in 1865:

By a singular anomaly in our administrative organization, [the sub-prefects] witness the arrival, through the Prefects, of precise daily orders which have to be executed within specific times; but when they look around them to ensure that these injunctions have been followed, they come face to face with mayors, whose various and important attributions have given them greater effective powers than their own, and whose failings cannot be remedied by administrative action.79

The same remark, incidentally, could have been made by prefects in relation to the role of mayors of big towns. These peripheral forms of power increasingly undermined the centralist thrust of the Empire’s political management of its provinces, and forced the government to take local opinions, preferences, and interests into account. A similar change could be noted in the electoral arena. In the early days of the Empire, as noted earlier, the regime spared no effort to line up the administration behind official candidates in legislative and local elections. By 1870, as a result of a number of factors (most notably the parliamentary evolution of the regime, the internal political fragmentation of the administration, the unpopularity of official candidatures, the growing ineffectiveness of the system in many areas, and the social and political entrenchment of local notables) this practice was no longer considered practicable or even desirable in many constituencies.80 In the Limousin, for example, the 1869 elections were conducted with little prefectoral direction, largely because many local administrative officials politely but firmly refused to rally behind the official candidate.81

78Speech in Senate, February 14, 1866; quoted in Farat, Persigny, 293.

79Marquis Tristan de l’Angle-Beaumanoir, Etude administrative (Paris, 1865), 12.

80Louis Girard, Les elections´ de 1869, viii–ix.

81See Alain Corbin, Archaisme et modernite´ en Limousin au XIXeme siecle` (Paris, 1975), 893–4.

Equally significant was the Second Empire’s role in the emergence of modern municipal politics. Local political factors were therefore allowed to play a much more significant role in determining electoral outcomes, as was symbolized by the growing proportion of mayors who stood for election.82 The re-emergence of adversarial politics and the challenge of opposition groups in electoral contests from the early 1860s rapidly demonstrated the limits of a centralist system which had to operate through universal suffrage. This was brought home most vividly in the government’s policy over the appointment of mayors. In the early days of the Empire, the regime made clear that it expected the absolute subordination of the mayor to central government. Mayors who failed to give effective support to official candidates, for example, could expect little sympathy from the government. By the early 1860s, however, the regime was forced to adopt a much more flexible posture. Dismissing a mayor who exhibited sympathies for republican or legitimist candidates was recognized as a counterproductive gesture in areas of local opposition strength.83 Similarly, it made little sense to appoint a mayor from outside the municipal council if the vast majority of elected councillors were from the opposition.

Thus, while the government retained the power to appoint mayors, and reaffirmed this prerogative in its confrontation with the 1870 commission, the nature of its choices was increasingly influenced by a recognition of local correlations of power. By the late 1860s, accordingly, republican mayors were being appointed by the regime in urban areas with large republican support, and this represented a further recognition of the regime’s departure from centralist practices.84 Even with respect to such a hallowed principle as the appointment of mayors, therefore, the evidence clearly suggests a trend toward what might be termed creeping (or incremental) democratization. As a defender of the Bonapartist record stated, “The choices of mayor made by the Empire were fitting, and based much less on partisan considerations than is generally believed.”85 We would thus conclude that both the debates of the 1860s on centralization and the municipal practices of the Second Empire constituted a turning point in defining a new civic consensus in France about the status and functions of the mayor.86

82 See Jean Goueffon, “La candidature officielle sous le Second Empire: le roleˆ des considerations´ locales,” in Albert Mabileau (ed.), Les facteurs locaux de la vie politique nationale. Colloque (Paris, 1972), 379.

83Thus, after the 1863 elections only 31 mayors were dismissed for political reasons. See Bernard le Clere` and Vincent Wright, Les pref´ ets´ du Second Empire, 145.

84See, for example, the reports on the 1870 municipal elections in Le Temps, August 24, 1870.

85Fernand Giraudeau, Vingt ans de despotisme et quatre ans de liberte´ (Paris, 1874), 79.

86Maurice Agulhon, Les maires en France du Consulat a` nos jours (Paris, 1986), 14.

CONCLUSION: BONAPARTISM, DEMOCRACY, AND MODERN CITIZENSHIP

The Second Empire attempted to use its local government system to promote a specific type of democratic citizenship, which respected established order, concerned itself with material and technical rather than political matters, and identified with the Bonapartist values of consensus and order. However, this conception of citizenship struggled to emerge from the contradictory objectives of Bonapartist elites: depoliticization and the practice of universal suffrage, administrative omniscience and citizen involvement in local life, the maintenance of social order and preservation of the Revolutionary heritage of civil equality; the cultivation of a traditional and deferential polity and the modernization of political life. There is no doubt that the Second Empire genuinely desired to see greater civic participation in public affairs. However, the imperial regime never really decided on what precise terms this civic involvement should occur, nor indeed what ultimate purpose it might serve. In the end, it was the Republic (the regime which eventually established itself after the collapse of the Second Empire in 1870) that succeeded in reconciling these conflicting imperatives, and creating a stable and durable framework for the operation of national and local democracy in France.

The institutional failure of Napoleon III’s regime should not detract from the significant contributions of the Second Empire to modern democratic theory and practice in France. What has emerged in this chapter is that Bonapartists reflected seriously about universal suffrage and its place within their political system. In this sense, their important legacy to the republicans was to stress the socially conservative character of the mass vote, a message that was not lost on the opportunist and radical elites of the Third Republic after 1877. The political dynamics of the local government regime that emerged in the 1860s, also clearly anticipated the republican system of territorial government, most notably in the pre-eminence of powerful elected notables over administrative agents of the state. The democratic and parliamentary evolution of the Second Empire in this sense confirmed (despite the regime’s initial contempt for politics) that the political legitimacy which stemmed from direct election through universal suffrage was greater than that conferred by patronage or traditional state offices. By the late 1860s, this “democratic superiority” was manifested at all levels of the representative hierarchy, from the deputy to the mayor (a point which, incidentally, also highlights the major discontinuity between the First and Second Empires).

More generally, between 1852 and 1870 the Bonapartist regime served as a laboratory for the exploration of some of the key questions raised by

democratic theory. Within the Bonapartist movement itself, centralizers and decentralists argued about fundamental issues that still engage our attention today. At what point should local democracy be overridden by considerations of general interest? Does the devolution of power to local bodies not unduly expose the ignorant and the vulnerable to the machinations of provincial oligarchies? Is the Bonapartist ideal of a “government far removed from the men it governs” not the best means of guaranteeing civil equality and state impartiality? At a time when modern democracies are increasingly lulled by the sirens of decentralization and “subsidiarity,” the years of the Second Empire offer a robust reminder that in the tradition of 1789 (which was, let us not forget, as much republican as Napoleonic) “government of the people” is not merely about formal processes, but more fundamentally about creating institutions to promote a distinct conception of “the good life.”

PART II

Bonapartism, Caesarism, Totalitarianism

Twentieth-Century Experiences and Reflections

modern efforts to understand, say, Bismarck’s regime or plebiscitary rule more generally.

A second approach to the study of Caesarism, and the one that I will adopt in this chapter, focuses less on the empirical validity of the concept than on its meaning for those who employed it in the vernacular of their time. From this perspective, Caesarism is of interest because of the light it throws on a series of linked nineteenthand early twentieth-century debates on the tendencies of mass democracy. Here the focus is not on finding concepts adequate to the historian’s job of theorizing about the past, but on reconstructing how various agents in that past made sense of their situation; on discerning the lexical significance of Caesarism as a topos, speech act, debating foil, accusation, or discursive token. More concretely: What was a thinker like Max Weber doing with this term – what purpose or purposes was he pursuing – when he invoked it? What were the discursive conventions around Caesarism with which he was in accord or which he sought to overturn?

The distinction that I have just drawn between these two kinds of investigation is, to be sure, somewhat artificial. After all, many modern historians who find profitable work for the concept of Caesarism can claim with justice that they are not imposing an alien vocabulary onto the nineteenth century, but merely extending a term that was then both current and widespread. But if that argument is to be advanced credibly, modern historians are still obliged to show that they understand the mercurial quality of the terms with which they are working. Even for the best historians, this is not always the case. Consider, for instance, the following remark on the nature of German “politics as theatre” between 1848 and 1933:

The idea that politics, and especially foreign policy, can serve as a drama to distract public attention, is a fairly familiar one. It is also at least as old as the Roman emperors’ provision of “bread and circuses.” In our period [1848–1933] the key concept is indeed Caesarism, or Bonapartism as it is more usually called. The modern idea of Caesarism or Bonapartism owes much to Marx, who developed it as a way of describing the regime of Napoleon III that followed the revolution of 1848 in France. Of the many features of Bonapartist rule about which historians continue to argue, two are especially relevant here. One is the use of foreign policy success to divert opinion at home, the other the use of plebiscitary techniques to appeal direct to the people over the heads of political opponents. In recent years many German historians have looked at Bismarck’s form of rule in this way. [emphasis added]3

3David Blackbourn, “Politics as Theatre: Metaphors of the Stage in German History, 1848–1933,” in

Populists and Patricians: Essays in Modern German History (London, 1987), 246–64, at 249.

What is wrong with this, on the face of it, quite unexceptional view? To begin with, it involves a double slippage, eliding Caesarism with Bonapartism, and Bonapartism with one theory of it, Marx’s. As a result, it leaves little room for those contemporaries who, like Leopold von Gerlach, categorically distinguished between Bonapartism and Caesarism,4 or who, like Max Weber, described Bismarck as a Caesarist but not as a Bonapartist figure. It is also very unlikely that Marx’s theory of Bonapartism had much purchase outside socialist circles in the second half of the nineteenth century, whereas other notions – employed by conservatives, political Catholics, liberals, and republicans – covered a far greater range of popular discussion.5 So perhaps with “the modern idea” of Caesarism David Blackbourn is referring to the appropriation of the idea by post-1945 historians of Germany and France, an inference that gains in plausibility as we read the rest of the passage. However, if that is the case we have evidently left far behind nineteenthand early twentieth-century commentators, and are now concerned instead with those among us who seek to interpret the former epoch and who are looking for the most appropriate concepts with which to do so. Finally, as Blackbourn later acknowledges, when Weber himself turned to criticize the debacle of German foreign policy6 – notably, the Kruger¨ telegram (1896), the “Yellow Peril” speech (1905), the Moroccan crises (1905, 1911) – his target was not Bismarck’s success in diverting public attention from domestic problems, but the crises engendered by the “personal regime” of Wilhelm II – whom, incidentally, Weber never publicly called either Bonapartist or Caesarist.7

I have quoted Blackbourn not to trip up with pedantry a fine historian of the Kaiserreich, but to show how easy it is to skate unreflectively over modern and vernacular usages of Caesarism and to assume a kind of vague symmetry between them. But as I now want to demonstrate with the example of Max

4Gerlach, letter to Bismarck, June 5, 1857: in Horst Kohl (ed.), Briefe des Generals Leopold von Gerlach an Otto von Bismarck (Stuttgart/Berlin, 1912), 218. While Caesarism, “the arrogation of imperium in a lawful republic . . . is justified by an emergency,” Bonapartism, Gerlach argues, is revolutionary and illegitimate.

5Unrivalled discussions of German usage remain; Heinz Gollwitzer, “The Caesarism of Napoleon III as Seen by Public Opinion in Germany,” Economy and Society 16:3 (1987), transl. Gordon C. Wells, 357– 404 (German original 1952); and Dieter Groh, “Casarismus,¨ Napoleonismus, Bonapartismus, Fuhrer,¨ Chef, Imperialismus,” in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch–sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. I (Stuttgart, 1972), 726–71.

6Weber, “Parliament and Government,” PW, 196–209.

7In private correspondence to Hermann Baumgarten, Weber did refer to Wilhelm II as Bonapartist and also called him a “Caesar,” though Weber is probably punning here on the word “Kaiser.” See, respectively, the letters of December 31, 1889 and January 3, 1891, in Max Weber, Jugendbriefe, edited with an introduction by Marianne Weber (Tubingen,¨ 1936), 323, 328.